Chris recently posted on his Facebook wall criticizing vegans forcing their dogs to have a vegan diet. This was followed by all sorts of comments from general agreement, to contempt and outrage at the very thought, and some defense of vegans who might do this. I’m a vegan but I didn’t respond because the topic seems to me to be more complicated than “Yay or nay.”

(I’m not criticizing Chris here for his views or any vegans/non-vegans for theirs. In fact, my ultimate conclusion will be undecided at best. However, if there isn’t a wealth of outraged comments below with at least one or two insulting my way of life I will be sorely dissapointed).

To be totally clear on what the hell I’m talking about, I’ll just copy/paste Chris’s Facebook post along with the link he included:

“As a person, you can choose whatever diet you like. If you have a moral objection to eating meat, more power too you. Your dog, however, does not share your morals, and you are wrong to force them upon him/her. Don’t like the fact that owning a dog contributes to to the deaths of other animals? Don’t own a dog!” Vegan Diet for Dogs: A question of thriving vs. surviving

Again, just quoting Chris here because he summed up that side of the argument pretty well. And the link provided goes into many sides of the argument.

A vegan diet means entirely plant-based. No meat or dairy or eggs. Many people consider this way of life ridiculous (and some, oddly enough, are ENRAGED by it) for humans, so I could see many people scoffing at the idea of dogs eating this way. What I want to do here is focus on the moral debate and leave the actual ‘health’ side of the argument for another day. This sounds ridiculous, as many people will argue that it’s unhealthy for dogs to not eat meat. All I will say to this is that there are in fact experts on both sides of the camp that say a dog eating vegan is very healthy and that it is not healthy. Just like with humans, this debate is ongoing and a bit confusing. I suggest reading up on it from a variety of sources. But please try and focus on the moral side of the debate in the comments, since the health side would require an entirely different article.

Anyway, the main thing I’ve noticed that people have against feeding a dog vegan is that it’s against the dog’s nature and therefore wrong to ‘force’ it on him/her. In fact I’ll quote Chris again here (you make it easy to pick on you, Chris, since you’re so damn vocal about your opinions):

“We do control their diets […] but isn’t that part of the problem when it comes to animal rights? How is it that a vegan can believe in an animal’s right to be secure in its existence (one of the main tenants of veganism if I’m not mistak…en), but still not see that animal’s right to eat the diet it biologically is supposed to eat? Yes. A dog can eat basically anything you feed it and survive, but is it right to force your human morals on an animal that does not share them? A dog would not choose a pile of beans over a pile of meat, so what right do vegans have to force that choice on them? Doing that seems to violate the entire spirit of veganism to me. From an animal rights point of view forcing a vegan diet on a dog hardly seems any less controlling than raising chickens for their eggs.”

This really gets into the heart of the moral matter and my eventual point. A vegan would claim that it is wrong to use an animal against its will since animals, as living beings, have basic rights. So how can a vegan claim such, yet force a pet to eat a certain way that it wouldn’t necessarily choose? In fact, how can a vegan ‘own’ a pet at all? Doesn’t that go against the basic tenets of veganism? Jesus I’m getting deep here. Or ‘in deep,’ depending on how you look at it.

Tenets or beliefs are great, but unfortunately they are often stated in a black and white way, and the shade of our world tends to be a tad grayer. Chris stated in that first quote that if a vegan doesn’t want to contribute to another animal’s death, they shouldn’t own a dog. To me there’s one glaring thing wrong with this statement. Dogs live in the world we humans have, for better or worse, created around them. I bolded that because it’s sort of my thesis statement for this article. Dogs were domesticated by humans and have evolved with us for thousands of years and spread over the globe living alongside humans. In essence, we helped make them what they are. Domesticated dogs now depend on us, and not owning one based on principal is, to me, to turn your back on them.

Non-vegans probably have no problem agreeing with all that. I was just making a point about vegans owning dogs. Onto the much more controversial part. VEGAN DOG DIETS.

!!!

The main argument against giving a dog only plant-based food (besides health concerns, just focusing on morals) is that it is against their nature and therefore wrong to force it on them. This, like the vegan ideals, seems a bit too black and white in this gray world. Why? Well a few reasons. Firstly, when saying that dogs “in nature” would choose meat over beans and vegetables every time, what are we talking about? Their ancestor the gray wolf? Because like I said before, dogs have evolved right along-side us and have generally eaten what was available (as stated in the article, dogs living in the alleyways in China have learned to live on scraps they find). I’d imagine that alleyways and human encampments are not what people picture when they say “dogs in nature.” Maybe they’re imagining some giant forest area somewhere where dogs roam free and wild? My point is that most domesticated dogs’ “natural environment” is in human towns and cities. Not the Congo.

Secondly, still talking about this “nature” thing, I have a huge problem with people citing the food chain and the natural order when talking about our meat consumption in industrialized nations. When I think of nature, I think of scenes on the Discover Channel of a cheetah taking down a zebra and eating its guts. That is certainly nature. Or, to bring it closer to home, your cat hunting down and killing a rabbit in your back yard. That is certainly nature. A species of beings (humans) breeding and gathering mass amounts of another species of beings and ritualistically slaughtering them in the most profitable way possible in order to feed their own species’ growing gluttony is not nature. Taking the leftover remains from these slaughterhouses unfit for human consumption and grinding them down, mixing them with corn meal and giving them to pets similarly has nothing to do with “nature.”

If that seemed melodramatic, my bad. You get my point though, right? The argument that feeding a dog plant-based food is less natural than feeding them this smorgasbord of by-products leftover from the meat industry just seems silly. And what is the difference between “forcing” a plant-based vegan-diet and “forcing” a ground up leftover animal part diet? Either way the dog is forced to eat what we decide is best. And of course there are alternatives to these two choices. A much higher-quality meat-based diet is entirely possible. It’s just either too expensive or too time-consuming for most people to bother. Once again, I’m not really saying the vegan diet is better for a dog than a high-quality meat-based diet. I’m just taking a cue from punk bands and stating the problems as loudly as possible without actually offering solutions.

So even if you think a vegan diet isn’t necessarily cruel, you may ask why should it be considered in the first place? Well that’s the last part of the debate here. Are vegans simply pushing their point of view on their pets? Or are they really thinking about what’s best for their pets? The part about what’s best for the pets would really require getting into the whole health aspect and this article’s too long already. So let’s put a pin in that. As for forcing viewpoints on animals who can’t choose, I can’t say I disagree that that’s what’s happening. But taking into account that dogs’ and our lives are now hopelessly intertwined, there’s really no easy solution.

What I really think is this: It comes down to whether or not you consider a cow or chicken or pig or turkey’s life less valuable than a dog’s. I’ll admit it’s much easier to feel empathy for dogs because they’re right there with us and they’re so cute. But cows and pigs are very intelligent animals with just as much emotions and insights into the world around them as dogs. If we traditionally owned pigs then would we be having this argument about whether or not it’s right to breed and round up dogs and have them slaughtered to fill our pigs’ bowls? Sound ridiculous? Why? What’s the difference?

Like I said, I have no solution to speak of. I guess my point was that there are other things to take into account before deciding that one diet is wrong for a dog and the other is right. Let the comments fly!

I might coin my role as a sex partner ‘undefined’ at best. I’m there but I’m not there there. Some might mistake me for just another morbid pattern in the wallpaper. Sometimes the wallpaper might even start to peel, while recently-applied glue runs down the wood paneling to the floor. That’s the cumshot.

It’s not that big a deal since I’d only finished a bit over one page. Like I said, it was mainly the facial expressions I wanted to alter. But to do them convincingly I made the faces slightly more realistic. But to draw with more detail I have to draw on a larger scale, so the shading ended up being a bit more detailed too.

Here’s some stuff I wrote about facial expressions on FlyingOskar.com, if you don’t feel like going there to read it:

For most artists, rendering humans (or anthropomorphic animals) is definitely an important skill. Whether they are very realistic or mostly cartoonish, facial expressions will be employed. The most stylized cartoons stick with very simple mouth shapes and eyebrow positions along with body language to get the character’s emotion across. For example, in the first page I posted:

The mouths, eyebrows, and occasional beard-stroking were employed to get across a character’s mood/thoughts. My main inspiration for this simplified style is Walt Holcombe, whom I’ve mentioned before. His characters convey emotions in this manner. However, when looking back over the page, my characters just seemed stiff and boring. So, as you can see in the new page, I’ve attempted to render their faces slightly more realistically and use simplified-yet-accurate facial muscle movements to try and get more emotive faces. (The more detailed panel is a result of having to draw on a larger scale because I tend to draw larger when including more detail).

Probably the best book written yet on rendering facial expressions (and really just info on expressions and facial muscles in general) is this book:

As you’ll read in this book, there are a surprising lack of artist’s resources when it comes to facial expressions. Strange, considering they are a universal language. This book identifies every muscle of the face and where it’s attached and how it moves. The different combinations and intensity of muscle movements are what give us the wealth of expressions of which we’re capable (and body language adds a whole other dimension).

Just one quick example. The Zygomatic Major is known as the ‘smiling muscle.’ One end is attached to your cheekbone (one on each side) and the other is attached to the skin at the corners of your mouth. When they contract, they pull the corners of your mouth diagonally toward your cheekbones, making a smile. Your cheeks bulge, distinct folds appear from your nose to around your mouth, and your bottom eyelids are pushed slightly up, making a slight squint-like look. Classic smile. Now add the Curragator (muscle that pulls your eyebrows down and close together to make mad eyebrows) and you have an EVIL SMILE. Take the smile away and leave the mad eyebrows, now you look like you’re concentrating or confused. Pull one half of the Frotalis up (the muscle that pulls your eyebrows straight up) and you could be perplexed yet interested. And so on and so forth.

Definitely a useful resource. See if you can buy it from a bookstore or directly from the author (Gary Faigin) before getting it from Amazon for 3 cents.

Someone added me on Twitter! That’s impressive considering I haven’t tweeted in two years (if you don’t count random Conan tweets about winning a car). Also the guy adding me is Chris Staros, the dude from Topshelf Comix (One of my favorite publishers). I’m sure he’s adding people with the word ‘comics’ in their name but still, it’s a tad inspiring. Add me on Twitter if you haven’t already. I think there’s a link somewhere on this page. I swear to the no-god that I’ll start tweeting again.

The first page with added crosshatching and more black space. I recently got some harsh criticism on this, some of which I disagree with, but one main point I do agree with. The characters are pretty stiff and uninteresting, including their facial expressions. So I’m redoing this page and this next panel which I finished before deciding this.

I like the design of this panel so it’ll stay similar when I redo it. I need to add more character to the buildings as well, make them more interesting. Anyway, I got the name of the rabbi at the local synagogue who probably will be interested in helping me with this project. So now I’ll be reading up on Judaism (I got “Judaism For Dummies” so far) and then I’ll contact this guy. I also have a friend who (as far as I know) is interested in following Judaism. I think it’s part of her heritage, but she has some problems with things about the religion, such as not accepting homosexuals (though the synagogue here is actually reformed Judaism, so they do accept homosexuals).

I think I did this panel pretty well. It’s not finished. There’s no background, I don’t like the font or the little marks signifying where the words will be. But the character models, the composition. I think it all works well. The idea is to have 3 long panels going down the page in the “interview portion,” like this. Then, there’s the “historical portion” (when a character talks about religious history) or just some different ways of illustrating what a character’s talking about in an interview. These portions will be in 3 tall, vertical panels on the page. That’s the basic idea for the whole layout.

Here’s a description I recently posted on the webzies:

It’s a documentary-style comic about religion in my town. I live in Spartanburg, SC and a friend of mine recently converted to Islam. It turns out we have a mosque, and after going there a couple of times I started looking around and finding some non-Christian places of worship tucked away out of sight. So I started trying to meet people who practice stuff like Buddhism and Wicca while simultaneously somehow living in the Bible Belt.

It’s been interesting. So far I’ve interviewed a Wiccan lesbian couple, a progressive liberal atheist who’s family goes way back to the first settlers around here or something (and they’re all hardcore Church of Christ people), a Muslim dude my age who’s also a doctor and has lived in the U.S. in the South most of his life, etc.

I’m not really trying to have a specific narrative per se, just presenting a side of the South that’s not seen much, I guess. It’s turning out to be more about me (a lot of documentaries turn out to be about the person making them, I think) in that I also grew up in the Church of Christ and only in the past few years became an atheist. I’m planning on having a part about Christianity as well, but it’s pretty much just going to be about myself and my family (my mother, who’s a devout Christian and also hardcore conservative Republican, doesn’t know I’m an atheist. But I do plan on interviewing her about Christianity and telling her. So that will probably be pretty dramatic).

I’m not doing it just for indie publisher fodder, but it does seem like a good idea to maybe get my foot in the door?

Right now I’m starting the long process of typing out the interview from the tape recorder. I’d guess about 3 to 3 1/2 hours for one side of tape. Then it’ll be time to edit and reorganize, then chop it down some more, then get some thumbnails for pages started, all while practicing with a brush (because this will be done mainly with a brush, which I’ve never used before). I figure if I get the Wicca and Islam interviews illustrated along with some history behind them and some info about Spartanburg, tying them all together well, then I’ll have something I can send out to see if publishers are interested.